Discussion
Hey #UnionPlace family! I need your help.
We've got about 230 active users. The cloud hosting bill for the instance is a bit over $500/mo. We're down to about $100/mo of income from people-who-are-not-me.
That means I'm out of pocket $400+/mo to keep this going, and that's not super sustainable, even with my employer's non-profit matching cutting that in half.
I don't want to shut down the instance, but I can't keep up this level of funding either. What does the community think?
1/n
@paco 6 vCPU, 24 GiB RAM (on Google's N2 tier, Intel Cascadelake-class platform), total of about 400GiB of balanced persistent disk (hybrid of SSD/HDD performance), associated networking, backup snapshots, etc. Object storage is separately in a GCS bucket but is a relatively small part of the costs.
It's nothing obscenely huge. Mastodon does like to chew it all up when there's backlogs or heavy activity or database maintenance.
@tim $6000/230=$26 per user. That seems like a small price to pay to use the server, and I'm not flush with cash.
If I forgot to donate last year, I'll rectify that now.
You shouldn't have to pay for this alone.
Are there ways we might be able to coordinate occasional/quarterly/annual donations better?
Monthly autopayments are a bit of a luxery for folks with reliable disposable income, BUT a few bucks in the hat when its possible has been a grassroots way.
How do we know when piecemeal donations pay off?
Could we be having a party or little event periodically to celebrate and organize microfunds? Something unfancy and to the point, maybe.
@tim Firstly: I can probably up my donation. Secondly: is there a means of donation that sends more money to you/the server and less towards the transaction fees?
@matthubbs directly via Stripe is probably the lowest total fees.
@tim Am I missing something, or does Stripe not have a mechanism for recurring donations?
@matthubbs nope, you're not missing anything, apparently I have never set that up properly. Weird. And of course Stripe doesn't make it trivial to set that up natively.
PayPal is probably the best bet for now, then, their per-transaction fee is a little higher but the percentage on the rest is about the same (or even a little bit lower).
@tim I might be biased, because I work for a small datacenter and hosting provider, but have you considered getting out of the cloud? $500 a month for 230 users seems excessive, but I’m not super familiar with the scale of hosting a mastodon instance. Also, getting out of the cloud (especially if it’s one of the big 3) is a good idea for a whole bunch of other reasons.
@keelan Mastodon is a pig, sadly.
We could try a migration to masto.host, which (might) drop our hosting costs. Our database is pretty big, though, so unless we trim out a lot of remote history (which we probably COULD do, but isn't well-supported), it'd actually wind up not that much cheaper.
More people could donate... https://www.laborunionnetworking.org/donate/
We could try to find some "corporate" sponsorship perhaps from a friendly union organization (if you know of one, my ears are open!)
2/n
Or, well, that's about my list of options, other than shutting down or me continuing to fund things. I've done what I can to control costs with our current cloud hosting, and I just don't see a lot of squeezing I can do without sacrificing usability, or backups, and a service without backups seems ... pointless ... to me as an SRE. :)
Thoughts/feedback from the community welcome!
3/3
If there were some fun handdrawn lineart you could have about donation info/reminders, would you want that sent somewhere to be reviewed for possible use?
My profession is in other places, but I can draw hands.
@lightbocks sure, if you have ideas I'd be happy to take a look. Images to get attention are definitely a valuable tool. Feel free to DM me or email to tim [at] union dot place. Thanks!
@tim First, I want to thank Tim for all the work he's put into Union.Place. I think we should explore every viable option; both to reduce hosting costs and to possibly obtain sponsorship. That said. I want to say this in as gentle a possible way, and with complete understanding that all our circumstances are our own, but…500/230 is not an insurmountable number. I'd encourage anyone who can donate…please consider it.
@tim 💔
In your position, I'd try to find a union to sponsor the instance, with you as the 'manager'
The $$/mo would be chump change for AFSCME's national org, & their sponsorship would give them reason to promote their #Fediverse platform (i.e., expand # of potential donors)
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@tim Hey there. I saw your post about exorbitant hosting costs. How big is your server?? I run a 501(c)(3) micro ISP out of my garage (nova.org). My uptime is nothing like a cloud (2 nines) but I’m sure I could host you for a fraction of what you pay today. I’ve got dozens of cores and hundreds of gigs of RAM and terabytes of disk available. Maybe I underestimate what it takes. But I’d be happy to discuss. Clouds are cool and all, but they’re not cost effective for hobbyists. Let me know if you want to chat about it.